Revision as of 10:28, 14 March 2011

Insert either the installation DVD into the computer's DVD drive or insert the USB drive containing the installation media into a USB port. Boot the system and the installation should begin. If the computer instead boots into an existing operating system, reboot and check your computer's BIOS program to ensure that the drive containing the installation media is listed first in the boot order. Save your BIOS changes and reboot.

After a couple of seconds, a series of lines of code will scroll down the screen, meaning that PC-BSD is being loaded. Soon after, you should see a screen similar to Figure 3.1a:

Figure 3.1a: PC-BSD Installer Boot Menu

There are 8 options to choose from:

1. Boot Installer [default] - Starts the installation program with all standard options enabled. This is the default if you don't select anything else within 10 seconds.

2. Boot Installer with ACPI disabled - This disables power management, which may be useful for certain BIOS's and laptops. If the installation program hangs while probing your hardware, restart the computer and see if selecting this option makes a difference.

3. Boot in Live Mode - Select this option if you want to try out PC-BSD without installing it.

4. Boot in Safe Mode - Select this option if the installation still hangs when probing your hardware and option #2 did not help. It will boot with a forced PIO mode (disabling the use of DMA), disable write caching for all IDE hard drives and CD ROM drives, disable the probing of EISA slots (as very few systems have them), and (on i386 systems) disables the use of ACPI and APICs.

5. Boot with verbose logging - Select this option if you would like to see more detailed messages during the boot process. This can be useful if you are troubleshooting which piece of hardware is causing the installation to hang.

6. Boot to emergency console - Advanced users can use this option to fix critical system failures.

7. Run X in VESA mode - If the installation program is unable to load your video driver, restart the computer and select this option. The installer will default to VESA mode which will work on any system with a video card.